


Maybe It's His First Time Around

by Katherine



Category: You Can Call Me Al - Paul Simon (Song)
Genre: Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-21
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-12-27 06:17:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975434
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katherine/pseuds/Katherine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So he felt flat, like the postcard he would not find and write and send.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Maybe It's His First Time Around

**Author's Note:**

  * For [winterhill](https://archiveofourown.org/users/winterhill/gifts).



The girl's face had reminded him of a bat, somehow. Not fangs, of course, but an impression of roundness and short, sleek dark hair. She would lead on adventures, he was certain, but Al was not the one invited along on those.

He could write about it in a letter, or better yet a postcard. A postcard would get a little more attention, since it could be pinned up over a desk or stuck up on a fridge, if only for the picture if not his words. But he did not actually have a plan of who he could write to.

His nights alone here might feel shorter if he had family to write to. It would have been a comforting thing to have family of his very own who would be missing him and awaiting his homecoming to them.

So he felt flat, like the postcard he would not find and write and send. Surely someone with a family would not feel so flat.

Now without even the one person who had been a role model to him for a time here, he was adrift. This was a strange world to him and he did not want to be travelling it alone.

* * *

When he met Betty, who was so clearly where she wanted to be and familiar, he started to hope he could have a new role model in her.

* * *

_"Do I get to call you anything?" he asked in an incongruously small voice, dipping his head. She could see the first signs of a bald spot within his muddy-coloured hair._

_"My name, you mean?" she questioned in return. The man nodded again. She wondered how few years would pass before his hair thinned to baldness at the front. He looked worn, and shy, and distressingly aware of his own unfamiliarity._

* * *

"Are there names I shouldn't be calling you, then?" she asked him.

He shook his head uncomfortably. He must have said what he meant in some wrong way again, implied things he never meant. This was another one of the incidents—the many confusions—that led to allegations of rudeness he had no intention of causing.

Yet instead of dismissing him she asked what he had meant, and asked further back. Telling a story directly to this person he had met instead of writing it to someone he knew already was difficult. She had asked him to, yet that almost made it harder still, because the story mattered.

* * *

_He told a disjointed story, but his awareness of his own mis-steps—for he recognised that he had made those, even when he could not explain how they happened, or quite what had been meant—led her to keep listening._

* * *

Strangely he liked Betty's way of often laughing or seeming about to do so. She would shake her head and and yet still be kind. He had a persistent idea that she felt his need to be protected without thinking less of him for that.

He started to feel—so quickly—that she was a friend. Not only that, but as if she had been his friend for a long time. Betty was, he thought, someone who if she received a postcard from him would tack it up word side facing her: answering the opportunity of a story from him.

She was a help for not only stories, both her own smooth telling and her patiently drawing other from him, but in response to Al's many questions.

"Are they to watch over us?" Al asked one time. "The angels on the buildings?"

"I can take you on a field trip," Betty said, smiling at her own phrase in the way she often smiled, seeming near to laughing. "No gawking, mind," she warned him. "No standing staring, or turning yourself around to keep looking."

He wanted to see everything and understand it all.

"Or," Betty said even more gently, "we could stay here and I will start telling you those stories."

* * *

In the next long night he spent, of course still alone, there was barking and yipping outside. Al told himself that probably the sounds were from wild dogs: dogs gone wild and breeding themselves wilder. Probably they were small, and mostly brown, and some with floppy ears, and if tamed back from their recent wildness would answer to Rover or Spot. Yet he imagined hyenas. Those were big and roughly spotted and most with cold eyes. They would crunch his bones.

"Don't hyenas crunch bones?" he asked Betty in the morning.

Instead of answering him directly, she led him to the marketplace, past the loud cattle, where she found for him a particular stall. She talked to the woman whose stall or whose family's stall it must be. Their talk together was liquid, comfortable, all in the language that Al did not know.

Betty looked with concentration through the cardboard box of yellow-edged magazines until she found the one she wanted. Betty bought it. Al acknowledged to himself that he should not mind that; of course it was Betty who bought the thing, because Al was not the one who held the currency here.

She paged through the magazine with him and showed him the dusty photos: slope-bodied hyenas, the spotted, unbalanced-looking adults much as he had imagined them in the night. But the next page she showed him had babies with round, dark ears. Those did rather look like puppies.

* * *

_He wanted to hear stories from her._

_Soon he might even be ready to hear ones that she planned to make amusing. This world would feel less strange to him once he felt comfortable enough to truly laugh._

* * *

There were things that she explained to him without words, where she led him to the answer, or left him thinking, or most often told him a story that answered his question in a meandering but satisfying manner. Some of the things he leaned about were ordinary, others more grand.

Betty could take him on adventures. They could go on adventures together, guarding and being friends to each other.


End file.
